Issue 4, 2008
Prompt Corner 
The motif I have kept noticing through this fortnights productions and publications is authenticity, whether in writing, staging, criticism or even in our activity of reprinting reviews.
Flaw
Benedict Nightingale, in his review of Speed-The-Plow, rightly questions the plausibility of the second-act turnaround in which studio exec Bobby Gould is talked around from being about to green-light a prison movie with a bankable star into going with an adaptation of a turgid "literary" novel. He is also right to say that this does little to detract from the fireworks between Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum in the first and third acts; they are surely the most dynamic double-act to hit the London stage in years. But I wonder whether that second-act flaw is not indicative of a weakness in Mamet's writing more generally. I'm not thinking of the fact (though it is a fact) that he writes far better male roles than female. Rather, it seems to me that I can't recall a Mamet play in which a plot twist was plausibly achieved by sustained argument rather than sudden revelation. Even the definitive work of Mametese Glengarry Glen Ross, which is all about the use of words to change people's opinions (in the form of salesmanship), rests its crucial reversal on a single slip of the tongue.
The speed of Spacey's and Goldblum's tongues in the first act was also remarked upon by several reviewers, who were hard put even to pick up a number if lines. I saw the show a few days after the first reviews had come out; perhaps they were marshalling their resources in a matinee performance, but I suspect that the matter had been noted and worked on – at any rate, the dialogue was pacy and dynamic rather than frantic and gabbled.
Chum
Tim Walker suggests in his review of An English Tragedy that "when it makes its inevitable West End transfer I would recommend [...] drafting in Rupert Everett to play John Amery", thus demonstrating his own priorities as regards various kinds of authenticity. It seems that Everett's being almost a generation older than John Amery is not a problem; rather, Tim is being an authentic friend to Everett, who has not only appeared in previous pieces as a noted chum of the reviewer but on occasion even as Tim's theatregoing companion. Strangely, he didn't mention that connection this time.
Klan
The ultimate example of faithful adherence took place in Leeds. I may not have seen Hamlet at Elsinore, but I have now seen Sarah Kane's Blasted in Room 807 of the Queen's Hotel in Leeds, which although unnamed in the script is generally accepted to be the hotel she had in mind for the setting of the play. The Nineteen: Twenty Nine company performed it to around a dozen people at a time, instructing the audience to wear masks a la Punchdrunk, and with I suspect a similar unspoken ambivalence of effect. It was not simply a matter of making us appear impersonal to each other – even, in our Ku Klux Klan-style white hoods, sinister – as we watched the progression of sexual and violent abuse in Kane's dystopia. Rather, up so close, I think it might also have been easier for the performers not to have recognisable faces watching them... for it was we who were in their faces more than they in ours. (In any case, I apologise to the company for not being masked myself; there weren't enough hoods to go round, and the performance began just before I could tear holes in one of the pillow-cases.)
In any case, I found it instructive to see that authenticity of location can actually detract from the power of the viewing experience. Obviously, we don't truly believe in these events when we see them onstage, but again the closeness served principally to emphasise their unreality and the fact that the company were working gingerly around numerous constraints. (They couldn't even get an exemption from the hotel's smoking ban for the several cigarettes smoked in the script; consequently, the character of Ian, supposedly unrepentant about the disintegration of his one remaining lung, had on this occasion to keep taking out his packet of cigs, preparing to light one up and then either changing his mind or being distracted). All told, it was a brave idea, but one whose drawbacks should perhaps have led to its abandonment before it was fully executed (no pun intended). Still, it took me a while to drop off to sleep in the same hotel later that night... a problem I doubt was shared by the company, who had scheduled three or four performances a day for themselves at two-hourly intervals, leaving them only 10-15 minutes between shows.
Bent
Nineteen: Twenty Nine are in effect a student company, so strictly speaking we have bent Theatre Records normal rules a little in order to include reviews of this production, since it seemed worth taking note of and moreover took place under the aegis of the West Yorkshire Playhouse. But elsewhere in this issue we were asked to bend our rules rather more: the writer of one of the plays reviewed in these pages requested that we omit what was in fact the only review that show received from the major publications we reprint, and to run instead some reviews from web sites, a sector we don't address at all. The print review, of course, was a poor one, the online write-ups more favourable. But that's not our business. As those two words on the cover have it, our task is to record and to chronicle what is written in the area we cover, not to flatter by selecting what we do and do not reproduce about each production. That's why, even though we now lay out our reprinted reviews on computer rather than physically pasting up from the original publications, we still don't correct obvious howlers when they pop up. It's the job of the writers and their editors to see the work into print in a proper form; our job is to be faithful to the original review, rather than to sense!
Ian Shuttleworth | ian@theatrerecord.com
At the Back
Can You Hear Me in Iran?
The 26th Fadjr International Theatre Festival has just closed in Tehran, with Klaus Peymann's Berliner Ensemble production of Brecht's Mother Courage, perhaps not surprisingly, carrying off the prize for Best Play. That Mother Courage should still be described in the Iranian press as an "anti-fascist drama" is some indication of the state of Iranian theatre at present – or rather not present, since like the country itself it is living in a time-warp world that would be difficult to imagine anywhere else. The week-long Festival included one hundred and fifty or so productions, performed in venues all over the city, but centred on the City Theatre's complex of five theatres, plus the splendid former opera house, Vandat Hall. Apart from the Berliners, a dozen or so other foreign troupes were invited, including Poland's Biuro Podrozy with their outdoor take on The Scottish Play, What Bloody Man Is That?, seen on last year's Edinburgh Fringe. But the main purpose of Fadjr is to show new Iranian productions, the best of which will then be taken up for performance and touring throughout Iran by the country's equivalent of the Arts Council, DAC (Dramatic Arts Centre).
Competitive
I had the good fortune to be invited to a seminar on theatre criticism that preceded the Festival proper, and with only a brief stay missed the competitive excitements of the week, but I was able to catch three of the eight productions selected as the best of Iranian theatre over the preceding year. In this I was luckier than some other British colleagues, who had been expecting to run workshops in conjunction with the Festival. Apparently, the UK authorities had made some rather strong demands of an Iranian troupe due to tour their traditional "Tazieh" theatre, a kind of Islamic Mummers' Play, in Britain. "Can we have everyone's fingerprints?" "Can we see the deeds to their properties?" and so on. In view of this, the Tazieh troupe did not go ahead with their tour, and the British participants in Fadjr were in turn refused their visas.
Ovation
The three shows offered an interesting perspective on current Iranian theatre. First up was a production by Hamid Samandarian, perhaps the doyen of Iranian directors, of Friedrich Dikrenmatt's The Visit Of The Old Lady, a play that still resonates for me in the Complicite production of 1988. This version was staged in the City Theatre's main hall, where, as usual, the audience far outnumbered the available seating. A cynical friend said to me, "Sure, the theatres in Tehran are all full. What else would you expect, with ten playing spaces for a population of seventeen million?" Nevertheless, there is a great enthusiasm for theatre from those who do get to it, many of them young products of the huge number of theatre courses available in Iran's universities. This production, like the other two I saw, was greeted with a prolonged standing ovation.
Samandarian had big resources at his disposal for his production, beginning with a cast of over forty to play the villagers of Gallen, where the immensely rich Clara Zachanassian returns to exact her revenge on her former lover, Alfred III. A mixture of professionals and students, this large cast did not always bring its benefits, as many of them moved uncertainly about the stage. But his leads did well, even if they reflected the rather dated, overemphatic acting style that is typical of Iranian shows I have seen. It served well for some of
DOrrenmatt's own over-emphatic cabaret scenes, but less so for the play's more tender moments. A three-dimensional design of rather cumbersome settings moved us quickly enough from Clara's apartment to Alfred's bar, on either side of the wide stage, leaving plenty of room in the centre for the bigger scenes including Alfred's "trial" and death. In this final scene the massed extras came into their own, as they enthusiastically set about their victim.
"Improvement"
Nader Borhani Marand had a much smaller space for his production of Ibsen's The Wild Duck, the City Theatre's eighty-seater (and eighty-stander, given the usual mad overcrowding in Tehran's theatres) Chaharsoo Hall. This did not discourage his cast from the all-out, downstage centre acting on which I have remarked, although his women, particularly the acting student playing Hedwig, managed rather more light and shade. A cleverly constructed set gave us a useful representation of the Ekdal household, where a strangely sympathetic Gregers Werle came across as the saviour of the family rather than its destroyer. That was not the only "improvement" the director made on the original. He seemed able to tell Ibsen's story perfectly well while adding his own commentary to it. Thus the death of Hedwig is followed by her elopement with the lodger Relling, who takes on an entirely new and much more central role in this adaptation. The chief disappointment in an otherwise useful questioning of the original play was the two fathers, Old Ekdal and Old Werle, played by younger actors struggling to avoid senile caricature and largely failing in their struggle.
Obsequious
The only original Iranian piece I saw was the hit of the season, Afra, staged in the Vandat Hall by the prolific theatre and film director Bahram Bezaei. Leaving aside the now-familiar full-out acting, this production showed a fine originality. Simply and swiftly moved against blacks, the few items of scenery took us through a large succession of scenes showing the persecution and final salvation of the play's title character, a young teacher who falls foul of the local grandee family when she refuses to marry their inbred son, and has her position undermined, then her life ruined by the false rumours they spread. As a portrait of an anxious, obsequious society turning on its own, it bore great similarity to The Visit. Its most interesting feature was the author-director's decision, influenced perhaps by his affection for traditional Tazieh, to tell his story in the form of a series of monologues in which the many characters advance the action, each taking up where another leaves off. From single figures, almost reciting, on stage, we move to greater and greater, well-managed crowds, as Afra's predicament develops. The play's framing device of a playwright at his desk, actually putting the piece together, produces a charming coup de theatre as its climax, when the writer himself comes on stage to claim Afra as his bride.
Beneath the mainstream of a lively Iranian theatre there are disturbing undercurrents. The performance of Wild Duck was dedicated to the distinguished director sitting beside me, who had earlier in the day told me of his seven attempts to have productions accepted for performance over the last two years, all refused on account of his standing as a dissident.
Ian Herbert | ian@herbertknott.com
Contents / Reviews
Reviewed in issue 4, 2008: |
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London |
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BEING HAROLD PINTER / GENERATION JEANS Two presentations by Belarus Free Th |
Soho |
14 Feb |
23 Feb |
171 |
BLONDE BOMBSHELLS OF 1943 Revival of play by Alan Plater |
Rose, Kingston / touring |
19 feb |
23 Feb |
192 |
CLOUD PIECE New piece by Nic Green |
BAC |
23 Feb |
15 Mar |
172 |
DAD'S ARMY: THE LOST EPISODES Stage production of television scripts by Jimmy Perry & David Croft |
Hackney Empire |
13 Feb |
16 Feb |
164 |
THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF EACH OTHER Revival of play by Peter Handke (NT) |
Lyttelton |
13 Feb |
12 Apr |
167 |
IOLANTHE Revival of operetta by W S Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan (Raymond Gubbay/Carl Rosa Co) |
Gielgud |
11 Feb |
16 Feb |
156 |
THE LIVING UNKNOWN SOLDIER New piece by Simple 8 |
Arcola |
15 Feb |
12 Mar |
186 |
MARILYN AND ELLA New play by Bonnie Greer |
T R Stratford E15 |
21 Feb |
15 Mar |
190 |
NOEL COWARD'S BRIEF ENCOUNTER New adaptation by Emma Rice from Noël Coward (Kneehigh) |
Cinema on the Haymarket |
17 Feb |
22 Jun |
175 |
OEDIPUS LOVES YOU New play by Gavin Quinn and Simon Doyle (Pan Pan Th) |
Riverside |
12 Feb |
24 Feb |
180 |
THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE Revival of operetta by Gilbert & Sullivan (Raymond Gubbay/Cart Rosa Co) |
Gielgud |
18 Feb |
1 Mar |
181 |
PRESS New piece by Pierre Riga! |
Gate |
19 Feb |
8 Mar |
155 |
THE RESISTIBLE RISE OF ARTURO UI New adaptation by David Farr/Lucian Msamali from Bertolt Brecht |
Lyric Hammersmith |
20 Feb |
15 Mar |
187 |
RING ROUND THE MOON Revival of Christopher Fry adaptation from Jean Anouilh |
Playhouse |
19 Feb |
|
183 |
SCARBOROUGH New play by Fiona Evans |
Royal Court Upstairs |
11 Feb |
15 Mar |
152 |
SENTI-MENTAL New play by Dean Stalham |
Union |
15 feb |
1 Mar |
191 |
SHADOW LANGUAGE New play by Kelly Stuart |
Theatre 503 |
22 Feb |
15 Mar |
189 |
SPEED-THE-PLOW Revival of play by David Mamet |
Old Vic |
12 Feb |
26 Apr |
158 |
TOUGH TIME, NICE TIME New piece by Ridiculusmus |
Pit |
14 Feb |
15 Mar |
173 |
UNDER THE EAGLE New play by Andrew Cartmel |
White Bear |
21 Feb |
9 Mar |
174 |
WORLDS END New play by Paul Sellar |
Trafalgar Studio 2 |
21 Feb |
8 Mar |
182 |
Regions |
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BLASTED revival of play by Sarah Kane (Nineteen, Twenty Nine TC) |
Leeds, Queen's Hotel |
18 Feb |
22 Feb |
193 |
AN ENGLISH TRAGEDY New play by Ronald Harwood |
Watford Palace |
18 Feb |
8 Mar |
194 |
THE GROUCH New play by Ranjit Bolt, from Le Misanthrope by Moliere |
Leeds. WYP Quarry |
20 Feb |
8 Mar |
200 |
HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL New musical with book by David Simpatico, based on Disney screenplay |
Edinburgh, Playhouse / touring |
19 Feb |
1 Mar |
202 |
THE NOTEBOOK OF TRIGORIN Free adaptation by Tennessee Williams from The Seagull by Chekhov |
Exeter, Northcott |
19 Feb |
1 Mar |
199 |
OEDIPUS UK premiere of adaptation by Steven Berkoff from play by Sophocles (Blackeyed Th) |
Bracknell, South Hill Park / touring |
14 Feb |
16 Feb |
193 |
PICASSO AND ME revival of play by Mike Maran |
Glasgow, Citizens |
19 Feb |
23 Feb |
204 |
SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR Revival of play by Luigi Pirandello, tr. David Harrower |
Edinburgh, Royal Lyceum |
19 Feb |
8 Mar |
205 |
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Bristol, Tobacco Factory |
13 Feb |
15 Mar |
192 |
WAITING FOR GODOT Revival of play by Samuel Beckett |
Glasgow, Citizens |
15 Feb |
8 Mar |
201 |